Category: Uncategorized

Most check the LinkedIn site several times a week, and use it for job searching, networking and hiring.
A month after its debut as a public company and eight years after its launch, LinkedIn in June 2011 passed Myspace to become the No. 2 social networking site in terms of visitors, according to comScore.
Marketers can gain perspective on how best to reach LinkedIn’s profession-focused networkers by analyzing how they use the site and where they interact. In July 2011, market research firm Lab42 surveyed LinkedIn users and found that the audience is highly engaged: 32% check the site several times a week and 35% check it daily.
Lab42 also found that 42% of users update their profiles regularly and 81% belong to at least one group. LinkedIn users are interacting with the site, which means they are also interacting with the companies on the site, as well as seeing the ads served there.
When it comes to the reasons why professionals use the site, employees act differently based on their position. Top level executives use the site mainly for industry networking (22%) and promoting their businesses (20%). Middle management professionals are more prone to use LinkedIn primarily to keep in touch (24%) with others, as well as for industry networking (20%). Entry level employees, not surprisingly, are using the site mainly for job searching (24%) and co-worker networking (23%).

The “2009 B2B Social Media Benchmarking Study” found that those B2B companies already using social media were much more active in the space than their B2C counterparts, especially when it came to microblogging, participating in discussions on third-party sites, blogging and monitoring company mentions on various social media. B2Cs were ahead in a few areas: social media advertising, user ratings and reviews, and online communities for customers and prospects.

Not only were B2B firms more likely overall to maintain a social network profile, they were managing profiles across more social sites and were significantly more likely to be present on Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. B2C companies won the day at Facebook and MySpace.

B2B social media users were more active in measuring most social success metrics as well. Although B2C companies were slightly more likely than B2B firms to use revenues to gauge their efforts, more B2Bs were looking at Web traffic, brand awareness, and prospect lead quality and volume. Web traffic was the top metric for both types of company, however.

Six in 10 B2B respondents used Twitter search to monitor mentions of their company or brand, compared with just 35% of B2Cs. The difference in usage of Google Alerts was slightly smaller, at 59% of B2Bs versus 40% of B2Cs. Consumer-oriented firms were most likely to keep tabs on mentions via Google search, at 61%, just edging out B2B companies, 60% of which googled themselves for this purpose.

There are only so many hours per day that consumers can spend watching TV, reading newspapers and surfing the internet. But as marketers may suspect, the time devoted to media is undergoing some not-so-subtle changes.

eMarketer recently conducted a meta-analysis of data from dozens of research firms using a variety of methodologies. The result is a series of estimates of how much time consumers spend with all major media, regardless of multitasking or simultaneous usage, from 2008 to 2010. The estimates apply to average media usage of the general public, not solely to the users of each medium.

The average time spent with all major media combined increased from about 10.6 hours in 2008 to 11 hours in 2010, according to eMarketer. TV and video (not including online video) captured the lion’s share of all media time, about 40% each year. The share of media time increased over the same period, from 21.5% to 23.5%, as did mobile’s share, from 5% to 7.5%. The share of time spent with magazines and newspapers fluctuated between 10% and 7.5%, while radio and all other media—video games, movies in theaters and outdoor media—declined.

This year, the first members of the baby boomer generation will come of age for retirement. But as this milestone passes, a recent survey suggests many feel they will have to work at least four years longer than they originally planned, due to the recent economic downturn. It appears the Great Recession may have tarnished the boomer’s golden years forever.

Baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, number 77 million and represent about 37% of the nation’s total population aged 16 or older. According to an American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) survey of CPA financial planners, 79% said they had at least one boomer client who has delayed retirement because of the economy. When asked how many extra years those boomer clients expected to work, the CPAs said 32.3% responded that they needed 1 to 3 years, 39.3% said 4 to 6 years, 9.8% said 7 to 10 years, and 3.7% said more than 10 years.

This grim view of retirement lingers — despite the fact that many people are feeling more confident about the financial markets and the rebounding U.S. economy. What may be even more depressing, however, is that the people who have the financial assets to make them relatively well-prepared for retirement still feel that they will have to work additional years into retirement. The CPAs surveyed have clients who typically have between $500,000 and $5 million in assets. So if those folks feel they will have to work more years before retiring, it’s hard to fathom what people without such nest eggs may be facing.

The one thing boomers seem to be certain about is that they’ll need to get a little more silver if they hope to enjoy their golden years.

Real-time bidding, which heated up the display ad market in 2010, will continue to gain share in 2011 and become an increasingly significant force for advertisers, publishers and ad networks.

For this type of ad buy, marketers bid on impressions based on the site, the location of the ad, the number of impressions desired and any potential cookie data they can use for retargeting or other segmentation. Publishers “auction off” ad inventory in real time, automatically looking at the bids made by advertisers for various ad slots and which ad should be served based on the user currently visiting the page.

For advertisers, real-time bidding helps them buy audience instead of inventory. For publishers, the process of real-time bidding promises the greatest possible revenue on their remnant inventory, bringing it closer to premium pricing. This in turn means real-time bidding will also have an effect on the position of ad networks, which publishers often turn to in order to fill remnant inventory. Currently, according to Q3 2010 research from STRATA, more than four in five US ad agencies buy online ads through networks, while fewer than half buy direct from publishers.

“The display advertising market is showing continued intense growth, with a projected 14% increase in 2011,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst. “That gain will be partially due to real-time bidding, which will make monetizing more pages easier for publishers. Furthermore, the growth of real-time bidding is also partially due to brand marketers’ increased interest in buying display advertising.”

In addition to choosing between buying from ad networks and publishers, advertisers will increasingly be faced with another choice. On one side is classic ad targeting based on a site’s content, or the characteristics of its visitors, and on the other side is the idea that audiences matter but sites don’t, that marketers should follow their target audience wherever they go.

The techniques marketers use for ad targeting can, depending on circumstances, be employed either to advertise on particular sites or reach audiences across multiple sites. For instance, demographic data—the targeting used by the largest share of respondents in a Collective survey—can be used to identify the best way to advertise in either method.

In many ways, the battle between targeting tactics is a battle between web publishers and advertising networks about who owns the data. And from the marketer perspective, the battle affects whether their ad targeting is more effective at particular sites with particular demographic groups, or whether it’s more effective when advertisers buy specific audiences found across multiple sites.

If young people are the voice of the future, then terrestrial radio is in trouble.

The Edison Research report “Radio’s Future II: The 2010 American Youth Study,” sponsored by Radio-Info.com, highlights the shifting sands of media usage among US teens and young adults, and the results are striking.

Waking up to the radio was a routine for 12- to 24-year-olds a decade ago, but the number who do so has sharply dwindled since. As many young people have given up their music and newspaper habits, the internet has replaced much of that activity. In 2000, 71% of US teens and young adults listened to radio in the morning, in 2010 just 41%.

The same trend is observable in total time spent with various media. In 2000, teens and young adults were spending close to 2 hours and 45 minutes listening to the radio each day. By 2010 it had fallen to an hour and a half. Time spent online had risen from an hour a day to almost 3.

Radio penetration remains almost universal, but a number of alternative music listening services have also emerged. In 2010, 36% of consumers surveyed by Bridge Ratings ages 12 and over had listened to online radio in the past week; 17% had listened to a podcast.

Pandora is the clear front runner among online radio services, according to online listeners surveyed by Vision Critical in March. Pandora was cited as the favorite by 27%, and 42% had listened in the past year. No other service garnered more than a single-digit response.

More than a third of young women have fallen asleep with their PDA

Research from the Oxygen Media Insights Group shows that many young women are staying close with friends, family and presumably work around the clock.

A June 2010 Burst Media survey found that while internet users across age and gender divides felt attached to their technological gadgets like smartphones and netbooks, women ages 35 to 54 were most likely to say they would feel disconnected without them.

Women tend to use their mobile phones & the internet not just to communicate for fun but also to organize the lives of their whole families. According to December 2009 research from BabyCenter.

As timeshifting and web viewing have both increased in importance in recent years, live TV has generally lost out to what viewers consider more convenient media. According to a report from market researcher Morpace, nearly three in five US consumers watch at least some video on a device other than a television.

Further, Morpace found 52% of total TV viewing time consisted of live TV. Among younger adults ages 18 to 34, that proportion fell to 41%. Adults 55 and up watched live TV almost two-thirds of the time, but even Gen Xers and younger boomers were evenly split between live TV and several timeshifting methods.

Online was the most popular alternative to live TV, with about half of consumers using some online source for viewing video content, and a further 23% using a streaming video service like the one offered by Netflix, which can allow viewing on a computer, iPad or TV.

Adults ages 18 to 34 were more likely to use either online video format than older consumers, though their consumption of video from DVDs or DVRs was similar.

eMarketer estimates that about 85% of 18-to-34-year-old internet users watch online video at least once a month, but that includes both long-form professional content like television shows as well as short user-generated clips. Among older internet users, penetration is much lower; fewer than 44% of 55- to 64-year-olds and fewer than 26% of seniors 65 and up watch online video monthly.

The biggest flop of the new fall TV season wasn’t Fox’s Lone Star or ABC’s My Generation.
It’s Google TV.

The engineers at the search goliath appear to have pulled off the double whammy of disappointing the technorati and alienating the broadcast networks—two constituencies crucial to getting Google TV off the ground.

Currently, NBC, CBS, ABC and Hulu are blocking full-length episodes from being accessed via the platform. Per insiders, those nets are unlikely to budge anytime soon, in part because of Google’s arrogant yet naïve attitude when it comes to the network TV business.

Google execs, who declined comment, irked several representatives from the big three networks from the start by dismissing their concerns about protecting the lucrative network business model—and dependent relationships with affiliates and cable providers. One official compared Google’s stance to the quote often attributed to Henry Ford: “People can have the Model T in any color—so long as it’s black.”

“The ecosystem in TV pays for the content,” said one media executive. “I’m not sure Google gets that. They are approaching this as if it’s an academic MBA project.”

Even though the broadcast networks provide access to full-length episodes of their top prime-time shows on their own sites and, in the case of ABC and NBC, on Hulu, they clearly view streaming video on a TV differently. Beside the obvious metrics/sales challenges (Nielsen ratings versus online video views), Web video is far less lucrative for the networks.

Plus, the networks don’t like the idea of giving up control of their site experiences. Nor are they inclined to boost Google. “Why help them grow their business?” asked one exec. “It’s incumbent on networks to control user interface and their own distribution,” said Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, the media marketing company. “There is too much money at stake.”

For its part, Google’s official stance is that it doesn’t see network TV as being vital to Google TV’s success—since the product’s reason for being is to bring the whole Web to TV, not just shows.

Many don’t buy that positioning. “The reason people want the Web on TV is Hulu,” said Nilay Patel, managing editor, Engadget. “It’s a great site, but nobody wants to look at Engadget on a TV.” Patel is one of several tech luminaries to deliver harsh reviews of Google TV, calling it “incomplete” and “disappointing.”

Others were even rougher. MSNBC.com’s Technology called Google TV “nowhere near ready for your viewing enjoyment.” A major complaint among bloggers is that Google TV is hard to use for a dubious payoff. “It’s very complicated, and there was 35 minutes of set-up time,” said Patel. Plus, one of Google TV’s long-term

Still some are cautiously optimistic about Google TV’s appeal. Jen Soch, svp activation director advanced TV at MediaVest, theorized that younger demos may see a Web/TV hybrid as more of a natural. “It depends on how you grew up,” she said. “For teenagers, this could be all about short-form video.”

The economy suffered around the world in 2009, but the online advertising market showed its resistance to the recession. While total media spending dropped, online ad spending increased by 2% to $55.2 billion.

eMarketer forecasts that 2010 will bring a return to double-digit online ad growth, with global spending set to reach $61.8 billion. Growth will continue at rates of over 10% each year through 2014.

“By 2014 eMarketer forecasts that figure will leap to $96.8 billion, growing at an 11.9% compound annual rate, despite the slow, uneven and fragile global economic recovery,” said eMarketer’s Jared Jenks, author of the new report “Worldwide Ad Spending.” “These rates will be unmatched by other media.”

North America and Western Europe accounted for nearly three-quarters of the world’s online ad spending in 2009, but those mature online ad markets will post slower growth rates than developing areas in Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

In terms of dollars, however, the more developed regions will still increase by many billions because of their large established bases and still largely untapped potential of the internet.

The internet’s share of total ad spending worldwide will jump from 11.9% in 2009 to 17.2% in 2014. Continued high growth in the online space coupled with a 2009 spending decrease of 10.5% for total media, followed by a slower recovery, will help online get an ever-larger slice of the ad spending pie.

“The reasons for this growth in share are clear,” said Jenks. “Online is more measureable, more effective and where people are increasingly spending their time.”